Percy's first day at the agricultural college started in mist.
The college campus wasn't far—two buses and a half-hour walk—but it felt like a different world entirely. No towering red-brick walls or buzzing corridors. Instead, low-slung classrooms sat beside greenhouses and tool sheds, and behind them, open land stretched toward the horizon. Rows of poly tunnels gleamed faintly in the morning light, and a distant tractor rumbled like a promise.
It was the sort of place Percy could breathe.
His boots crunched over gravel as he made his way to the main building. A laminated name badge hung around his neck—"PERCY VALE, Agricultural Sciences T-Level Student"—as though anyone might confuse him with someone else. The first session was an induction talk in a high-ceilinged classroom that smelled of dry compost and metal polish. Posters of soil cycles and pollinator species lined the walls.
There were sixteen of them in total—his cohort. A small group, all handpicked from schools across the county. Some wore clean new workwear; others already had dirt under their fingernails. Percy kept to himself, sitting near the window where he could see the orchard beyond.
Their course leader was a wiry woman named Ms. Hartford. Her short grey hair was clipped behind her ears, and she spoke with the confidence of someone who'd once argued with a minister about subsidy reform and won. She didn't waste time with small talk.
"This course isn't for tourists," she said, walking slowly across the front of the room. "It's not a holiday from real work. Agricultural science is as demanding as any discipline—so if you're just here because you like tractors or think cows are cute, you've got the wrong idea."
No one spoke. Percy sat straighter.
Over the next few weeks, the course unfolded into a rhythm—a mix of classroom theory and hands-on practical work. They studied everything from soil pH and livestock welfare to agritech systems and renewable energy on farms. One day might involve feeding calves and logging their weights; the next might be spent in the lab comparing nitrate levels between test plots. Percy took to the structure instinctively. He might not have had top GCSEs, but this—this he understood.
He could feel the seasons in the land. He could smell the moisture in compost and know how far along a field was just by the angle of the light. His classmates began to notice too—especially one.
Her name was Lila.
She came from a family-run organic dairy three villages over, and had a quick, crooked smile and a habit of narrating her thoughts out loud. "I swear this pH meter hates me," she muttered one afternoon, shaking the stubborn device while Percy crouched beside a raised bed of sugar beet. "Every time I test, it gives me a different reading. Think it's possessed?"
Percy glanced at the meter, took it gently from her, recalibrated it with distilled water, and returned it without a word.
Lila blinked, then grinned. "You're a quiet genius, Farmer."
He flushed and looked down, pretending to double-check the beet spacing.
From then on, she stuck close—sometimes asking real questions, sometimes just talking through her work. Percy didn't mind. She was easy to be around, like a favourite well-worn tool that always fit your hand.
By mid-autumn, Percy had found a rhythm. He rose early, walked Snow before sunrise, caught the 6:45 bus with his thermos in hand, and came home after dusk with dirt on his jeans and notes stuffed into his coat pocket. The farm, meanwhile, carried on.
Matthew still handled the big livestock shifts, but more and more of the precision work—tracking birth cycles, plotting crop rotation schedules, testing the pasture nutrient levels—was falling to Percy. Elise noticed the change before he did.
"You've stopped resisting it," she said one evening, handing him a slice of spiced apple cake. "The farm. School. Everything. It's like you're finally... listening to yourself."
Percy shrugged but couldn't hide the faint smile tugging at his lips.
It wasn't just farm work. His strength, once something that embarrassed him, had become a quiet asset. While others strained to haul feed bags or struggle with fencing posts, Percy moved easily. More than once he found himself helping others lift crates or turn compost heaps, not because he wanted attention—but because it felt good to be useful.
One morning, during a livestock rotation practical, a young heifer panicked and tried to break from the pen. Students scattered as the animal thrashed, hooves clattering, but Percy moved calmly. He stepped forward, made a soft clucking noise, and stood his ground. The heifer stopped, shuddered, and let him guide her back with a gentle touch to the neck.
Ms. Hartford had been watching from a distance. She said nothing at first, but later, as Percy loaded hay bales onto a trailer, she passed by and murmured, "That was good stock work today. You've got sense."
It wasn't high praise. But coming from her, it meant something.
As winter rolled in, so did the group's first major project—an independent design-and-implementation task. Each student would choose a problem within modern agriculture, research it, and propose a working solution. The projects would form the backbone of their portfolios and be presented at the end of term to a panel of industry professionals.
Some chose sustainable irrigation models. Others, like Lila, were working on rotational grazing strategies. Percy wrestled with his idea longer than he admitted. He wanted it to matter—really matter.
He thought of the farm. Of Gran Nora. Of the old vegetable beds she'd once loved, now overgrown. And then it came to him: a biodiversity revitalisation project.
He proposed restoring a half-acre of neglected hedgerow and turning it into a seasonal wild pollinator haven. It would involve soil rehabilitation, wildflower planting, and installing sensors to track bee activity over time.
When he submitted the plan, Ms. Hartford raised an eyebrow. "Ambitious. Hedgerows are tricky to restore properly."
"I know," Percy said. "But it's doable."
She nodded once. "Then do it."
The project consumed him in the best way. He spent weekends collecting soil samples, mapping light patterns, and tracing native species—red campion, oxeye daisy, field scabious, birdsfoot trefoil. He learned to identify insects by wing shape, to track nesting behaviour in solitary bees, and even designed a rudimentary sensor rig using reclaimed weatherproof parts and Raspberry Pi.
Lila joined him one Saturday to help seed the wildflower mix. "You're insane, you know," she said, her cheeks pink from the wind. "Most people are just doing spreadsheets."
He smiled faintly. "It matters."
She didn't argue.
The night before his presentation, Percy barely slept. He paced his room, rehearsing facts about nitrogen cycling and microhabitat stability until Snow jumped onto the bed with a snort and rolled over onto his notes.
"Alright, alright," Percy muttered, scratching behind her ears. "I'll sleep."
The next day, he stood before the panel—three evaluators, all with clipped voices and sharp eyes—and spoke.
He told them about soil memory. About bees. About how hedgerows weren't just boundary markers but living arteries of the land. His voice shook at first, but as he spoke of Gran Nora's garden and the first snowdrops each spring, something in him steadied. He knew this. It lived in his bones.
When it was over, the panel nodded politely. Ms. Hartford offered no comment.
But a week later, the results came in—Percy's project had been chosen for a summer field trial by a local conservation initiative. His proposal would be implemented across five sites.
That night, he found Elise alone in the kitchen, wiping down the table.
He held out the letter silently.
She read it once, then again.
Her eyes filled, but her voice stayed light. "She'd be proud of you, you know."
Percy looked out the window. Snow was asleep by the garden gate. The wind stirred the dry leaves into small spirals, lifting them toward the trees beyond.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
By spring, Percy had changed. Not loudly. Not in a way most people noticed. But he walked straighter. He answered questions in class. He laughed more with Lila. He began to write down his observations, not just in project logs but in a small notebook he carried everywhere—notes about animal behaviour, climate shifts, planting experiments.
The college had become more than a course. It was soil for him to grow in.
And for the first time since Gran had passed, Percy stopped looking backward. He no longer felt like a root left exposed in the cold.
He was beginning to push upward, toward the sun.
By the time Percy reached the second term of his first year, the easy pace of early lessons had tightened. Expectations were sharper. Project reports grew longer. The college's sprawling farm site no longer felt so quiet — it buzzed now with the tension of assessments and field data deadlines.
It was during a practical assessment on nutrient runoff systems that Percy first really noticed Callum Greene.
Callum was sharp-faced, sharp-tongued, and dressed in fresh brand-name kit every Monday — all pristine gilets, fleece-lined boots, and a smell like expensive hair gel. He was from a large estate on the east side of the county, where his family owned over 800 acres and a private vineyard. Everyone knew it. Mostly because Callum wouldn't shut up about it.
"I just think," Callum said one afternoon, surveying a sloped paddock and taking exaggerated notes, "if people actually understood gradient runoff, we wouldn't have to keep explaining basic topography to certain classmates."
He didn't say Percy's name. He didn't have to.
Percy, crouched beside a drainage catchment pipe with his notebook open and sleeve muddy, said nothing.
Lila gave Callum a glare sharp enough to clip brambles.
"You know," she said, tossing her hair back, "some of us don't have six-figure consultants doing our homework for us."
Callum's lips curled, but he moved off.
Still, the jab landed. Callum wasn't stupid. Arrogant, yes. But he understood systems and data, and he spoke in polished terms during every class presentation. Worse, the instructors seemed to favour him — not overtly, but enough that Percy noticed the difference. Callum didn't need to explain why he'd missed a worksheet. He wasn't called out for arriving five minutes late.
There were others, too. Megan Lowrie, from the same estate, often hovered nearby, echoing Callum's comments. She had a pinched expression and a notebook always neatly squared to her desk. She and Callum shared a kind of cultivated disdain — always one step removed from the work, as if they were just practising for something bigger and more important than farming.
Percy, by contrast, still worked part-time with his dad in the evenings. Still cleaned out the pig sheds and helped rotate grazing fences on weekends. He didn't know how to talk like they did — but he knew how the earth changed after frost. He could feel when a calf was unwell by its breathing. He could guess the weather before the forecast.
And slowly, it began to matter.
During their mid-year assessment, the class was split into teams to design a crop rotation plan across five adjoining fields, balancing yield output, nitrogen demands, and pollinator access. Percy's group was Lila, a shy boy named Jay, and a girl from the coast called Nadiya, who had more tattoos than she had patience.
Callum and Megan, naturally, took charge of their own team. "We'll go for yield dominance," Callum said confidently. "No use in planting wild margins when half of it won't be marketable."
Percy disagreed. Quietly. Thoughtfully. "If you run wheat three years in a row with no clover, the soil goes sour. And the aphids will love it."
"You've been reading the Ladybird book of farming again?" Callum snorted.
But when the projects were submitted and reviewed by external assessors from DEFRA, it was Percy's group that earned the top mark. Their design wasn't just technically sound — it showed a holistic understanding of the landscape, using wildflower margins, companion crops, and efficient nutrient cycling.
Afterward, Ms. Hartford clapped Percy's report onto her desk and tapped the margin with one long finger. "This is what practical intelligence looks like," she said to the class. "Not just knowing what's in the manual. Knowing when it matters."
Callum didn't look up from his phone. But Percy caught the faint twitch of his jaw.
From then on, the rivalry simmered. Subtle, unspoken, but present.
Callum started raising his hand more often when Percy spoke. Megan started finding holes in every design Percy submitted. "Interesting approach," she'd say, flipping through the pages. "But wouldn't it be smarter to use mechanical weeding?"
"No," Percy would answer simply. "Not with that soil profile."
Yet Percy never chased them. He didn't have to. While Callum maneuvered for prestige, Percy dug into the work itself. And it showed.
He found himself invited to assist with real farm audits. He joined a trial on anaerobic digesters being run with a local co-op. His name appeared in an email chain about student contributions to sustainable education initiatives.
He didn't win awards. He didn't get glossy coverage in the newsletter. But the instructors noticed. The farmers who partnered with the college noticed. And Lila, who still walked beside him after long practicals and kept pressing wildflower seeds into his coat pocket, noticed most of all.
"You're blooming," she said one April morning, watching him explain pasture health to a group of year-tens visiting the college on a tour. "You don't even realise it."
Percy flushed. He didn't feel like anything was blooming. But he had stopped doubting himself so much. He didn't check his answers twice anymore. He didn't flinch when others questioned his work.
He wasn't performing. He was just being.
And that, somehow, was enough.
The final term came on with a strange stillness.
Gone were the earlier nerves of unfamiliarity — now, every creak of the workshop doors, every chatter of sheep in the pens behind the college, and every rustle of thick plastic folders in the common room felt familiar. Worn in. As though the place had grown around them like moss across a fallen tree.
Final assessments loomed: three weeks of concentrated practicals, written reflections, industry interviews, and a capstone project to round it all off.
The project was deceptively simple: design and present a working plan to transition a mid-sized mixed-use farm into a fully sustainable, carbon-aware operation. Students were allowed to choose their format — presentations, models, simulations, or raw spreadsheets and written design. What mattered was clarity, feasibility, and understanding.
Callum immediately announced he'd be presenting via interactive digital simulation, boasting proprietary data models and a drone survey over his family estate. He arrived to class the following Monday with a sleek silver laptop and a five-page printed executive summary.
Percy, by contrast, brought two hand-drawn field maps, a series of soil profiles he'd taken from his own family farm, and a thick, weather-worn binder of notes detailing crop cycles, livestock rotations, anaerobic slurry usage, and pollinator corridor planning. His visual aid was a model made from reclaimed wood and string — simple, but precise.
The night before his presentation, Percy barely slept. Snow lay curled at his feet as he sat on the porch, flicking through his papers again and again. He didn't feel clever. He felt tired. Wrung out. But also — strangely — ready.
When he stepped up to the front of the room the next morning, the only thing he brought with him was confidence in what he'd lived.
He spoke calmly, describing how their farm had adjusted to soil acidification over the past three years using field clover breaks and natural lime deposits. He explained how a single line of hedging restored the water table to two adjacent paddocks. He described how the herd's grazing patterns had been altered to regenerate damaged ground. No frills. No buzzwords.
Just farming.
When he was done, the room was quiet.
Ms. Hartford, seated beside two industry assessors, scribbled a final note before looking up. Her eyes met Percy's. There was something still and weighted in her expression.
"Thank you," she said. "You may sit down."
Percy stepped back, heart still thudding.
Callum went next, polished and articulate. His model was impressive — all flashing overlays and satellite soil scans — but even Megan seemed to glance at him with something closer to performance fatigue than admiration. The instructors asked him several questions. One of them leaned into another's ear midway through his pitch.
At the end of the week, the cohort gathered in the college's old assembly hall. Long tables had been cleared away, and the skylights streamed sunshine down onto the rows of seated students. A hush fell as Ms. Hartford stepped forward with the final rankings in hand.
"We don't normally announce results like this," she began, adjusting her glasses. "But this year, the college has been part of a national pilot programme, and our results will help shape the framework for future T-Level cohorts. Which means—your top scorer will be published in the national report."
Everyone straightened slightly. Callum sat up tall, jaw already working into a polite smile.
Ms. Hartford continued, her voice firm.
"Our highest-scoring student this year has demonstrated not only technical fluency, but a rare depth of environmental literacy, lived experience, and consistency across every core module."
She looked up.
"Percy Vale."
Silence.
Percy blinked.
Callum let out a short, involuntary laugh. Megan's mouth fell slightly open.
Someone clapped. Then another. Within seconds, the room filled with applause — not the polite, scattered kind, but the full-bodied noise of genuine surprise and admiration.
Percy stood, awkward at first, then walked to the front as Ms. Hartford handed him a plain brown folder.
"Well earned," she said, and for the first time since Year 7, Percy felt taller than his boots.
That evening, the sun hung low over the pasture when Percy finally got home.
The wind carried the scent of fresh grass and warm earth. Crows wheeled lazily over the fenceposts. Snow loped beside him with a slow, contented pant, her tail brushing the back of his legs.
Inside the house, his mum had left a plate out with a note: "Proud of you, lad. We'll be back after the Grange meeting. Soup on the hob."
He sat at the table in the quiet, still holding the brown folder in his lap. There were certificates inside. Praise notes. A letter from DEFRA offering a placement on their mentorship scheme.
But it wasn't until later, when the sun had dipped low and he wandered back out toward the barn, that the real moment came.
Matthew Vale stood by the gate, hands in his coat pockets, staring out at the eastern field. The same one Percy had sown wildflowers in two springs ago as part of his biodiversity trial.
"Went well, then," Matthew said without turning.
Percy nodded. "I think so."
A pause. The wind moved through the hedgerow.
"You know," his dad said after a moment, "I've been thinking. About the next few years."
Percy tilted his head. "Yeah?"
Matthew turned at last, eyes calm and lined, voice quiet.
"This place. The land. It won't run itself forever. I'm not done with it, but… you're ready to start taking it on. If you want it."
Percy said nothing at first.
The farm had always been there — behind every thought, every quiet morning, every step home from school. But now, it didn't feel like an obligation. It felt like a story he was ready to tell himself.
He looked up at the field. The fence line. The house light glowing in the dusk.
And he nodded.
"I do."
Snow leaned against his leg, warm and familiar. Matthew's eyes softened.
"Well then," he said. "Come spring, it's yours to start shaping."
The stars were just beginning to show as Percy looked over the land he'd always known — and realised, maybe for the first time, that it truly knew him back.